Tuesday, 20 January 2015

This post is adapted from a piece I wrote for a Perthshire Writers' Critique Night. They don't do blood-'n'-guts politics, so it's a wee bit gentler and (gasp) more even-handed than the norm. It was even gentler before I adapted it! Anyhow, enjoy, and I'll be back with teeth fully bared in the next day or so.

Life is festooned with unexplained mysteries.

For example, the irresistible attraction of
soup stains to my pullover, even when I’m drinking the stuff from a cup through
a straw. My wife’s ability to ask me a
question to which every conceivable answer is incriminating. The fact that ostensibly sane people still
watch Celebrity Big Brother. My habit of ordering liqueur coffee in
restaurants, knowing fine that (1) it indicates beyond question that I’m
already blootered, and (2) I’m rarely at my best ransacking the medicine
cabinet for Paracetamol at 4 am.

News reporting, nowadays fuelled by social media like petrol chucked
on a barbecue, only amplifies the sense of mystery. This week our faces were soundly slapped by
the news that the richest 1% on the planet are now as wealthy as the other 99%,
and the combined assets of precisely 80 fat cats match those of the poorest 3.5
billion. I don’t wish to be a miserable old cynic, but if you believe this is
purely the result of talent and hard work, you must be a candidate for the
Nobel Prize for Gullibility.

But here’s the mystery.
Why do we persist in electing governments that are, at best, complicit
in bringing this state of affairs about?
Or is it that the politicians we elect start out honest and idealistic,
only to find themselves confronted in a dark alley by a mysterious stranger
stroking a white cat and offering untold riches if they co-operate, and a
motorcade trip past a book depository if they don’t?

And, as we respond to the carnage in Paris with placards
proclaiming “Je suis Charlie” in the
name of freedom of speech (for which, mysteriously, each has his own private
definition), why aren’t we considerably more enraged that our high heid yins
are busy leaning on Google and Facebook so that they can listen in on us more
effectively? One might conclude that a
bunch of Charlies is exactly what we’re being taken for.

Meanwhile, the BBC, though happy to allow us to expend our
anger on Cadbury’s mucking about with the Creme Egg, or a cost-conscious mum
invoicing a five-year-old kid for not showing up to her son’s party, remains
completely ineffective at holding our leaders to account. That’s not unexpected, given the organisation’s
embrace of snivelling mendacity in the independence referendum. Nor is it
particularly mysterious, since interviewers know that asking the
powers-that-be, or powers soon-to-be, awkward questions won’t help their line
manager earn his MBE, and, anyway, there’s little need when the Government
writes such informative press releases.

However, the real mystery arose just today, namely how the
BBC thought it could hold an event with the Twitter hashtag #BBCDemocracyDay without being washed
away in a tidal wave of irony. This,
from one of the broadcasters with the effrontery to label certain political groupings
“main parties” and exclude the rest from their televised pre-election debates!

In the interests of preventing a peaceful writers’ meeting
from degenerating into a “stairheid rammy”, I must stress that I’m not particularly
pushing the SNP’s interests here. As the
party with the third-largest membership on these islands, they certainly have a
cast-iron case to be beelin’, but at least – rubbishy consolation as it is - Nicola Sturgeon’s desire to dig her tartan
stilettoes into her counterparts will have free-ish rein on BBC
Scotland. But the Greens have been
treated disgracefully, for no better reason than that UKIP, and particularly pint-wielding,
blokeish charlatan Farage, offers the juicy prospect of controversy and headline-grabbing
gaffes.

Mind you, as we all contemplate the unfettered joy of a
General Election campaign dragging on for four months, democracy itself is something
of an unexplained mystery. With the Labour spin machine in full cry, powered by
Keir Hardie rotating in his crypt, Murphy & Co are all set to take the credit for any
policy you can imagine, just as long as someone else thinks of it first. But it’s what happens as a result of our vote
that’s most mysterious, with the threat of a hideous series of unintended
consequences hanging around like an unflushable floater in a toilet bowl.

Depending on whom you believe, a vote for the SNP is a vote
for the Tories, a vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour, and a vote for either
Labour or Tory risks bringing the two parties together in the “national
government” Coalition From Hell. At
least everyone is agreed on one point: a vote for the Lib Dems is the
equivalent of setting fire to your ballot paper and dancing around it naked
until men in white coats come to sedate you.

But, in the end, the most inexplicable of this week’s news events
is one where the medium itself has become the story. Suddenly, and it would seem
spontaneously, the super soaraway Sun
is ending a 40-year tradition of sordid, complacent British misogyny by doing
away with Page 3.

The mystery is: where on earth can that raddled old reprobate
Rupert Murdoch possibly have found a conscience?Update 21/01/15: Hmmph! Was ever a blog overtaken by events as spectacularly as this, with the broadcasters now edging back towards fairness on the TV debates and scrofulous git Murdoch smirking about how he's fooled us all? There will be revenge.....

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Apologies, folks, for the outrageously wide gap between blog
posts of late. As usual, my biscuit-tin
of excuses is emptier than a pre-referendum bribe, but I’ve never let lack of
decent material stop me in the past, so here goes.

In the immediate aftermath of the festive fortnight, as I
cowered under the duvet, my head whistling with Paracetamol and my mouth like a
ferret’s latrine, I could surely be forgiven for pulling a sickie, couldn’t
I? Then, when I next awoke, we were
smack in the fallout zone of a weather bomb, with a howling gale scattering the
contents of my bin all over the street, so there was clearly enough
embarrassing rubbish flying around without me creating more. Two days later, the carnage in Paris rendered
my snappy one-liners about pygmy politicians judderingly irrelevant, even if I
tried to pass them off as cutting-edge satire.

One week on, however, it’s hard to see how I can get away
with pleading emotional damage caused by Cadbury’s desecration of the Creme Egg,
so enough is enough. There’s a General
Election just down the road (or autobahn
if you’re Tory), politicians are busy showing off the megaphones and la-la-can’t-hear-you
ear muffs they got from Santa, and the air’s so thick with dunderheidedness you
could slice off chunks of it for loft insulation. A cornucopia of delights for
an aspiring humorist.

Anyhow, you don’t get nominated for “Funniest Blog” in the Bella Caledonia awardsif you constantly fail to show up for
work. Accordingly, I didn’t, although
I remain optimistic that someone with
D, U and G in his name will win this year. But I’m buggered if I’m going to
give the competition such an easy ride in 2015. That means it’s time for
Another Bloody Relaunch.

I’ve been inspired in this effort by the parallel relaunch
of the new darling of the Scottish political scene, the Blessed Jim Murphy, who’s managed
to teleport out of his moribund Westminster career by discovering a love of
Scottish politics hitherto invisible to the naked eye. As a result, despite having previously achieved
little of significance in his entire sojourn on Planet Earth, apart from
costing the taxpayer more for his higher “education” than any other university
dropout in history, Jim’s now become the fawning media’s go-to guy for
headline-hogging political quackery.

His indyref strategy of aggressively shouting gibberish at
random passers-by, which at the time seemed like a cry for help from Social
Services, has unexpectedly proved to be a career masterstroke. I’ve already stuck my Caps Lock down with
Blu-Tack and, if I can learn to crank out stuff even half as unhinged as he was spouting,
I’ll be on the fast track to literary stardom.

I’ve also been impressed by Jim’s willingness to pursue
insanely ambitious goals, such as retaining all 41 Labour seats in Scotland in
May despite unanimous polling evidence that it’s as likely as a herd of rampaging
wildebeest winning Strictly. Of course, it’s possible that he’s had a
tip-off from John McTernan, who’s already seen the postal voting results. But the heck with it: if he can set that sort
of target without peeing himself with laughter, then I’ll expect a Nobel Prize
for Literature by return post just as soon as I publish my new book about
flower arranging.

I have plenty of Post-It Notes and crayons, so emulating Jim’s
policy development techniques should be no problem. The central thrust seems to be “1,000 more of
everything than the other lot, no matter what”, which if the SNP responds in
kind may make it impossible to visit the shops without being stalked by
half-a-dozen nurses trying to take your blood pressure. In that spirit, I promise readers that each
year I’ll publish 1,000 more seven-syllable words than Lallands Peat Worrier,
1,000 more scatological references than Wee Ginger Dug and 1,000 more scathing
put-downs than Rev Stu. My parodies will
be 1,000 times subtler than BBC Scotlandshire’s, so I won’t even need to write
any jokes and everyone will think they came straight from the pen, or the arse
if I’m being scatological, of Blair McDougall.

Dressing to impress could be a problem for me, since I don’t
possess a Scotland top like Jim’s, although I daresay I could rig up a giant
neon arrow to point at me saying “PATRIOT”. And if my body’s a temple, it’s one devoted
less to the sharp-elbowed cult of James Francis Murphy than to the worship of beer,
crisps and carefully-managed flatulence.
If I ever went jogging, it wouldn’t be along the Clyde towpath in front
of a bank of slavering paparazzi; it’d
be around the perimeter of Perth Royal Infirmary, in case the crash team needed
to haul me in for emergency resuscitation.
But, hey, nobody’s perfect.

So here I am, inviting you to hang on my every word once
again. If there’s anything you haven’t
liked about my blog in the past, remember:
just like Jim, I can change. All
you have to do is undergo the standard Men
In Black memory wipe to forget my flagrantly contradictory past. As long as it’s within the law or I’m
unlikely to get caught, I can pretend to be anything you want me to be. Socialist,
capitalist, nationalist, unionist, onanist… it’s all the same to me.

And, of course, if the foregoing turns out to be a total
pack of lies and the whole thing falls pathetically apart, I’ll deny I ever
said any of it.

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com